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On the Road Again

In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example. It also stands alongside the image of Jackson Pollock — in the series of photographs taken of him by Hans Namuth just a few months before Kerouac’s siege of the typewriter — dripping and flinging and flecking paint on a horizontal canvas, fighting and dancing his work into being. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical, which is why some writers feel the need to compensate by racing bulls or whatever, but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter seems like a feat of strength. Most writers merely produce effete works on paper, you might say, but Kerouac went and wrestled with the tree itself.

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

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Credit
Erik T. Johnson

In some ways, the differences are minor. “On the Road” in all of its versions is the story of a series of cross-country trips made by Kerouac between 1948 and 1950 — “trips” rather than “travels,” because they are all about covering ground, whether by hitchhiking, by bus or by drive-away car. The cardinal points are New York City, Denver and San Francisco, with spikes down to New Orleans, the San Joaquin Valley and finally Mexico. The trips are sometimes motored by impatience — if only the Rockies began on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel! — but most often Kerouac revels in speed as an ecstatic medium, a way of concentrating as much experience and as many aesthetic and spiritual highs as possible into a week or less. Essential to the whole enterprise is Kerouac’s relationship with Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in the novel), who is one of the greatest characters in American literature without any need for imaginative tinkering on the part of the author.

A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street. Kerouac, a working-class French Canadian boy from Massachusetts who won a football scholarship to Columbia but decided before long that he was less interested in sports than in writing, had given evidence of his obsession with the road as early as 1940. Meeting Neal Cassady, though, made it possible for him to write the mid-20th century’s answer to “Huckleberry Finn.” Cassady, with his need to move, his vast yahooing enthusiasm and his insatiable priapic drive, could have stepped out of Western legend. That he compulsively stole cars instead of guiding wagon trains and achieved enlightenment in bebop clubs rather than medicine lodges was merely a function of history. But he wasn’t a primitive, and was rather more than a found object. He read books and wrote sometimes spectacular letters, and he was more on top of the zeitgeist than his big-city admirers. He was a born hero and a euphoric lover of the world, who gave the Beats their soul, saving them — if just barely — from choking on their own mysticism.

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Jack Kerouac at the Seven Arts Cafe in New York, 1959.Credit
Burt Glinn/Magnum

In “On the Road” he is the love object, as Kerouac chases him from one coast to the other, and as well as being Kerouac’s Huck he is also his Virgil and his Dr. Johnson. He is the book’s biggest voice, a matter much more apparent in the scroll, where the voice is allowed to wail and swoop and riff without the commas that hobble it in the novel. For example: “Jack when I was working for the New Era Laundry in Los Angeles 1945 I made a trip to Indianapolis Indiana for the express purpose of seeing the Memorial Day races hitch hiking by day and stealing cars by night to make time. I was coming thru one of these towns we passed with a set of license plates under my shirt when a sheriff picked me up on suspicion.” It may not be immediately apparent from a brief excerpt out of context how the lack of punctuation replicates the speaking voice — the frantic rush of 16th-notes that will finally be punctuated halfway down the page by a thunderous “Yes!” or “Yass!” Not only did the editors of the novel add six unnecessary commas, but Kerouac himself can be charged with interpolating one sentence, two phrases, and an adjective (the sheriff is “nosy,” he “accosted” Moriarty “on the main drag,” and the plates are somehow intended for legitimate use) that groom and housebreak the character as well as his jazz.

Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby.

In the scroll the use of the word “holy” must be 80 percent less than in the novel, and psalmodic references to the author’s unique generation are down by at least two-thirds; uses of the word “beat,” for that matter, clearly favor the exhausted over the beatific. While such things may not assist the Kerouac legend or brand name, they help the book immeasurably. The scroll clarifies the book’s connection to the past — to Mark Twain and tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas — and underlines the features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative, Robert Frank’s great photographic road book “The Americans.” The novel that “On the Road” became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.

ON THE ROAD

The Original Scroll.

By Jack Kerouac. Edited by Howard Cunnell.

408 pp. Viking. $25.95.

Luc Sante is the author of, most recently, “Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005” and the editor and translator of Félix Fénéon’s “Novels in Three Lines.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: On the Road Again. Today's Paper|Subscribe